Burn the Midnight Oil
by kindredghosts
Summary: Hanji is studying her research of titans late into the night, and with all the events that have been happening lately she is feeling more than just a bit overwhelmed. She is angry. She is frustrated. Then when Levi hears a crash he comes to see what happened. Post chapter 70. Canonverse. Oneshot. Levi x Hanji. The fic switches between both of their POVs.


**Author's Notes**

I just fell so hard for the Levihan ship. It's adorable.

This takes place right after chapter 70.

All the line breaks are just to indicate when the POV switches. They do not mark jumps in time, and so the story should just be read as if there are no breaks.

* * *

Hanji sat in the dining hall. Everybody had long finished eating, kicked back the benches, and retired to their rooms for the night. The dirty plates had been collected and piled into a tower shoved too close to the edge. An unsound structure by design - or lack thereof - that threatened to topple over to greet the dust covered floors at any moment. Not that Hanji noticed, completely consumed by her work.

A candle burned on the table near her, the flame flickering and casting dancing light and shadows unevenly across the papers she was pouring over. Spread across the surface in front of her the sheets were laid in an incoherent order that nobody but Hanji would understand. A physical manifestation of her cogitation, it was a mind map of her thoughts, theories, and ideas scribbled into the creases of the weathered, yellowed pages.

Man eating titans. Titan shifters. Titan powers and abilities. The history of mankind. The Reiss family. Eren. The basement. The secret of the walls, the secret of the titans.

Questions swirled, speculations formed, and conclusions glinted like stars in the sky that were little out of her reach. Hanji pushed her glasses onto her head and rubbed her palms over her face letting out a frustrated groan. She had mulled over these sheets for hours...

Titans were humans caught in a nightmare. Had they really been killing humans all these years? But titans had been feasting on humanity, even if it was unwillingly or uncontrolled. For over a century. Humanity was pushed to the brink and oh. so. many. people. had. died. Irreplaceable soldiers. Precious friends. Lives snuffed out like they had no place in the world.

Fragments of times long ago floated to the surface of her memory. The screams that pierced her ears of her comrades dying. Mangled body parts left on the ground past the point of recognition. The tear stained faces of family members receiving the awful news. The sensation of sticky warm blood plastered to her hands and face as she held her best friend in her arms as her eyes closed for the last time. Droplets of titan blood that trickled into her mouth tasted sickly sweet, only to quickly evaporate into steam. The cool handle of her blade against her palm as she stabbed the titan in the eyes and then launched into the air and swung around to the neck to cut out the nape. The anger that consumed her like a frosty fire and fuelled her first battles with titans during a time when all she felt was hatred towards them.

The hatred that slept inside her like a beast stirred and seeped into her mind feeding off her fatigue and aggravation. Over the years she had learned to channel it, mostly into her research of titans, and it was all she could do to keep from snapping and flying into a rage when she was in front of others. Lull the beast into slumber. After the beast had been asleep so long, she almost felt like the person she supposed she would be if she didn't live in this world, if she hadn't experienced what she had, if she hadn't lost...

The beast clawed at her rampant, raw emotions.

She whacked her arm that was still in a sling against the table sending shockwaves of pain through her arm and it stung her eyes. She cursed under her breath and kicked the table leg sending the leaning tower of plates to the ground.

They crashed down but she didn't care, Hanji pushed away from the table and paced around the room absentmindedly rubbing her wounded arm. Her mind was writhing. Seeing a couple plates and cups still on the table she swiped them off the table, knocking the candle off the table with them and launching the sheets into the air. Her own stomping echoed too loud in her ears, her vision was blurring in her rage, and the beast was baring it's fangs.

A minute later there was a slam and then someone calling her name. Hanji turned towards the presence at the now open door. Levi's eyes darted around the room and finally landed on her, and it wasn't until that moment that she saw the fire that had started when she knocked the candles and papers off the table.

Her body flaccid, Hanji watched as Levi placed the lantern he was carrying on the table and then stomped on the fire. He was yelling, his words littered with profanity that was probably directed at her. As he extinguished the fire, she turned her head away from him. He focused his attention on her now, and stormed up to Hanji. Levi shoved her against the wall with his arm, and standing on his toes, grabbed Hanji by the back of her head with his other hand and forced her to face him.

"Were you trying to burn the whole building down!?" He screeched at her, pressing his arm into her ribs a little harder as she averted his glare. "What were you thinking? Why didn't you put it out? Do you have your head shoved so far up your ass that you couldn't even do that?"

Her eyes flashed with animosity as she returned Levi's glare. But then - her body went limp and her gaze fell to the ground.

* * *

Levi kew something was wrong when she didn't have a crappy retort.

"I'm sick of this," she said, slumping against the wall. Something inside of her broke. He could see it in the slight quiver of her lip and feel it in the unsteady way she drew in her breathes. He stepped away from her alleviating his force that had been pinning her against the wall and she slid unceremoniously to the ground, her head bent forward.

He clicked his tongue against his teeth and he crossed his arms, "tch". He had messed up by yelling at her when she was upset.

He lowered himself into a crouch beside her. "Four Eyes," when she didn't respond he tipped his head sideways in an attempt to see her face. She covered her face with her good hand. He wrapped his fingers around her wrist and pulled it away from her face without much resistance and brushed away the bangs hanging in front of her face with his other hand.

Her face contorted as she was fighting back sobs with tears silently streaming down her face.

"T-titans have...have killed," she fought down a snotty sob, "so many of friends." The last word was dragged out as she tried to keep her breathing under control. "I really," her fingers rubbed tears out of her eyes, "really hate them," she forced out, "but I can't...I can't do this."

'This'. It wasn't that she couldn't fight titans anymore, he knew that much. She had already proved that in the battlefield, he knew she wouldn't stop fighting them. 'This' was that she couldn't keep the face of steel anymore.

In an abrupt motion he cradled his hand around her head pulling her to himself, burying her face in his chest. His fingers laced their way through her messy, tangly, unkempt hair as his other hand wrapped around her back. Levi shifted from a crouching position to a kneeling one.

"It's okay. I hate them too." _You don't have to be strong right now, not when I'm around, I've got you._ Was what he intended to say, but the twisted journey from brain to mouth prevented that.

She let out a cry much like a baby's "wah" and borrowed her face further into his shirt. Her fist balled up against his chest encasing the fabric of his clothes in her grasp, wrinkling it he was sure.

They stayed like that until her tears stopped and her cheeks were dry again. She leaned back against the wall and Levi sat down adjacent to her.

"Never thought I'd see the day you'd sit on the floor willingly." She said, her eyes more or less focusing on the patterns left in the grime.

"Can it. That's not important right now." His eyes fell on the glasses that were still perched on her head. "Besides, can you even see me Four Eyes?"

"I'm not blind."

Still, Levi removed the glasses and placed them back on the bridge of her nose, where she pushed them into place.

Before she was able to drop her hand back down towards her side he took it into his own and began to trace circles on the top of her hand. A soothing method his mom used when he was upset as a child.

"I need you at your best tomorrow," he said to her. _I don't like seeing you like this_ , is what he couldn't manage to say.

"I know."

They sat silently as they listened to the wind rattling the windowpanes. Eventually with the wind whistling outside Hanji began to talk. Her words were a verbal stream of thought. She talked about her childhood, her time training in the military, and the first time she saw a titan. Events that had happened before Levi had even met her. It was easy to listen to her talk, to be enveloped by her life story, hearing of her heartache. The experiences that had made her into the person he was sitting beside now.

* * *

Carefully, meticulously the beast was put to sleep again. Talking through her thoughts soothed her, allowed her to get a grip on everything. Placing everything into compartments in her brain. Thoughts about titans. Thoughts about morality. Thoughts about the past.

Her graze dropped to Levi still drawing spirals on her hand. "I'm sorry to ramble so long," Hanji said scratching her head, "no one likes listening to me for more than a maximum of twenty seconds." She gave herself a pity laugh. Hanji finally felt she was back to being her usual self.

"I don't mind," he mumbled still looking down at her hand.

"Thank you," she whispered, although she hadn't meant to speak so quietly.

* * *

Pulling her arm, Levi lurched Hanji forward making their foreheads knock together, causing her to grunt with pain. "Thank me," he breathed into her face, "by putting out the fire next time, so I _don't have to_." Again the words he spoke masked what he really wanted to express. _I'm glad your looking like yourself again. If you ever need to talk, come to me._

"I will," she nodded, the movement messing up both their bangs.

Then, because of the movement of her forehead against his, he become very aware of how close they were. He cleared his throat and stood up. He extended a hand and pulled her to her feet.

Rubbing dust and dirt off her pants she said, "we're going to beat this."

Levi was also knocking bits of dirt off of his knees. "What?"

"The titans. Everything. I'll figure it out, we'll beat them. We don't don the Wings of Freedom for nothing."

The tension in his shoulders he didn't know had been there, eased. Exhaling, he agreed, "yeah." His attention was drawn to the broken plates on the floor. "I'll take care of that," he said. It was his way of apologizing for yelling at her before. He retrieved a broom from down the hall. When he came back to the room Hanji was sitting at the table, holding a couple pieces of paper salvaged from the fire. Sweeping the broken plates and ashes he made quick work of cleaning up the mess.

Finished, Levi took a seat across from Hanji and leaned his head in his hand. He studied her, studying the pages. Even with their new information about the titans, it only led to more questions and morally compromising dilemmas. Her eyebrows stitched together and her mouth was slightly ajar in contemplation. He knew she was struggling. He also knew that she would push herself too hard trying to figure everything out.

"Any brilliant ideas yet?" He asked. Making her speak aloud always helped her thought process. There were times when she would be rambling about her research or titan experiments to him and something would click. Then she would cut off mid-sentence and run out of the room. After that he wouldn't see her for hours, sometimes even a couple days.

"No not yet." Nevertheless she still explained some of the theories she had. A few of her quirky, weird smiles infiltrated the conversation as her passion for science came back to her. And yet again Levi listened to her talk, once in awhile interjecting. Not before long she stopped talking and threw her good arm into the arm stretching it. "I'm pooped. I think it's time to call it a night." She stood up, and turned to leave. "Don't let anybody wake me too early tomorrow morning, alright?"

Levi rolled his eyes, he was too sleepy himself now to come up with a snappy retort. He made his way towards the door, a couple steps behind Hanji.

"You know Levi, people misunderstand you, you're actually very sweet."

Where did that come from? He felt his cheeks warm, it was a good thing she couldn't -

Hanji pivoted. Laying a hand on his shoulder she kissed him on the forehead, "Thanks again, you big hearted thug." With that she left the room, leaving Levi standing in the room anchored to the spot he stood.

He brought a hand to his forehead. _Four Eyes!_

"We can beat them," he breathed. We can face whatever horrors tomorrow brings. Together.

* * *

 **Author's Notes**

Thanks for reading! All concrit is welcomed :D


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